picks ‘Rain on Leaves’,” LeBron James, a Calm evangelist, has said. I’m partial to “Forest Ambiance”.
Calm wants your attention – but not in the
same way as other tech firms (Shutterstock)In a world ruled by content, Calm offers a kind of anti-content. Half of the programming is stuff designed to
fall asleep to: if it’s working, you don’t hear it. I gladly pay to listen to the exact same thing night after night.
Although the mindfulness meditation sessions can take on a kind of narrative structure, they work to dispel
the stories we tell ourselves. They encourage us to dispassionately observe our emotions, to deconstruct our
physical surroundings into colours and textures and sounds, to fixate on the air entering our nostrils as we
breathe. I treasure some of Levitt’s lines like dialogue in a movie I’ve seen a thousand times. My favorite is:
“Become aware of the mattress or floor beneath you, offering support.” It makes me feel as if my Beautyrest
is my friend.
Maybe that sounds nuts. It’s true that the meta-conversation around these apps can be oddly stressful.
Embedded in them is a strange confluence of nonjudgmental acceptance and the pursuit of peak
performance of that nonjudgmental acceptance. Calm calls itself “the Nike of the mind” and rewards users
with a meditation “streak” every time they complete a session. Buddhify has a series where you meditate on
various features of your smartphone’s interface – “Now, resting your eyes on the big round pause button in
the middle ...” – that is too absurd to complete. Even the word “Buddhify” freaks me out. For some students
of Buddhism, and critics of capitalism, these applications represent a perversion of a social good in the
service of a cult of the self. They call it “McMindfulness.”
If you’re looking for an app to be your Buddha, Calm will disappoint you. But I am not religious, and I am
also not spiritual-but-not-religious. I am a person who downloaded a game to my phone that advertises itself
in the app store as “Addictive best block puzzle”, and I need help.
We are often said to be living in an “attention economy”, where advertisers and content creators and
technologies are competing to gobble up the scarce resource of human attention. Most of the media
pumped out by Netflix or Hulu or Luminary or countless mobile game developers is bent on grabbing that
attention and not letting it go. Calm wants your attention, too, but it wants you to pay attention to thinking
about attention – and the ways you waste it on self-hatred, and stress, and the endless scroll of social media.
Much of internet culture works by fitting a second skin over our experience, feeding us roiling
commentaries and meta-narratives and boundless information. Calm strips away all the layers of meaning
until all that’s left is the sensation of your toes lifting off the ground.
After the recording session, I meet up with Levitt for dinner at Toronto’s SoHo House, where she is a
member. It’s loud. We are almost shouting across the table. I ask her how it feels to have a one-sided
intimate relationship with millions of people. She tells me that it is unreal. It’s overwhelming, and it’s a
huge responsibility. She is accessing such depths of emotion with such a vast group of people. In supporting